High Sierra on Gigabyte GA-B75M

This post describes the steps to install MacOs High Sierra from scratch on my system, described here.

I have installed Mavericks, Yosemite and Sierra, using Unibeast for the first two versions, and Clover for the latest; but, after issues with Sierra, I had installed instead Ubuntu, and the new High Sierra install is therefore from scratch, not a OsX upgrade.

What in the past had been a interesting computer experiment, it is now decidely an almost too simple installation procedure. As special steps I just modified the proposed config.plist from Clover Configurator with the following values:

cpuid: 0x0306a0, for my Ivy Bridge i7 3770 cpu

Set the key AppleIntelCPUPM to true

For my gigabyte board, set the AppleRTC key to true as well.

I do not even now if whithout these changes I would have ended with a working Hackintosh! In any case, I can start MacOS using UEFI

The result is not a working proposal. All works, including sound, that never did in the past. It is true that the sound backside connectors are non-functionning, and I need to use the speaker jack, but all considered, I am fine with it. It goes to sleep nicely, although it requires well overy 30 seconds to accomplish it; afterwards, it wakes up easily.

However, if I let the computer on its own, the day after I find a switched on computer with a blanck screen, and checking the logs show me a dead system: why it switches back to life, but does not really recover? It sounds to me, remotely, like something related to hibernation: that is, system goes to sleep; after some time, the system wakes up to do a proper hibernation, but then, for some reason, it fails.

Checking the power management settings

pmset -g

, I find in fact that the hibernatemode is already zero, which should have prevente my whole issue. However, somehow, the sleep image file /var/vm/sleepimage is there.
This Apple forum discussion shows that an additional step is needed:

sudo nvram "use-nvramrc?"=false

Alas, this step does not solve the issue, so I went back to tuning the power settings:

standby: sets whether to hibernate when a Mac has been asleep for a set period; this writes memory to disk and powers down memory

womp: the same as wake for network access in the power settings pane powernap: the same as power nap in the power settings pane

autopoweroff: after sleeping a specifed period, the system will write an hibernation image and go into a lower power chipset sleep

These settings solve the issue. However, what I had seen was that the computer was slept for approximately 4.5 hours before waking up dead, and the standbydelay was 10000 (in seconds, less than 3 hours), and the autopoweroffdelay was 28800 (in minutes, 48 hours). So I presume the problem would be related to powernap. In any case, it makes sense letting the standby and autopoweroff settings disabled, once it is decided to disable hibernation.

I have two SATA controllers, an Intel chipset and a Marvell 88SE9172. Allegedly, the AHCI_3rdParty_eSATA.kext seems to provide hotswap functionality for this Marvell controller. but that is not the case.

What works is having a hard disk inserted in the rack when MacOS starts. It will appear in System Information as not removable, but in fact the drive can be ejected, and hot swapped.